


Tell the Truth

by PaperBodies



Series: tumblr posts [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Developing Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:13:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27567310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperBodies/pseuds/PaperBodies
Summary: “Tell the truth,” Billy says, low and intent, and Steve closes his mouth on a flippant response. For a second he feels exposed, pinned down. Not literally (if only), but still. He wants to protest—We don’t do that with this topic, remember? Or We’ve spent the last year being so goddamn careful, what are you doing?—but the rules of this particular game have only ever been unspoken. He glances over and sees Billy’s eyes on him, focused and intense and so, so blue, and he realizes that they’re actually doing this. He feels a surge of adrenaline, and the perverse little thrill that always comes with it (there is definitely something wrong with him). Well fuck, he thinks, here we go.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Series: tumblr posts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2014972
Comments: 8
Kudos: 76





	Tell the Truth

“Tell the truth,” Billy says, low and intent, and Steve closes his mouth on a flippant response. For a second he feels exposed, pinned down. Not literally ( _if only_ ), but still. He wants to protest— _We don’t do that with this topic, remember?_ Or _We’ve spent the last year being so goddamn careful, what are you doing?_ —but the rules of this particular game have only ever been unspoken. He glances over and sees Billy’s eyes on him, focused and intense and so, so blue, and he realizes that they’re actually doing this. He feels a surge of adrenaline, and the perverse little thrill that always comes with it (there is definitely something wrong with him). _Well fuck_ , he thinks, _here we go_.

Steve's never been sure whether it's a game or not. It was a thing they started doing after Starcourt, a way to push at each other when Billy was in a hospital bed and actual shoving was off the table, maybe. Steve remembers exactly how it started, because of course he does. He was at the hospital almost every day, shuttling Max and some combination of the others back and forth, but it's not like he and Billy actually talked to each other that much. Why would they? The only thing they had in common was mutual animosity, and Steve had kept his distance after he ended up concussed. Steve understood that night at the Byers' house better by then, after they all found out about Neil, but he still wasn't sure where that left them. So he was cautiously friendly, Billy was carefully neutral; they managed to coexist. Sure, sometimes they locked eyes across the hospital room and there was...something? maybe? but one or the other of them always looked away. Steve told himself he was fine with it, and it probably would have gone on like that indefinitely, except, well. Steve was always a sucker for a pair of sad, pretty eyes.

It was an evening like most of the rest of them, and Steve was rounding up Max, El, and Mike to leave the hospital. Max ran back to give Billy another hug, which was a pretty new development, and one that Billy seemed completely unprepared to deal with, which was kind of endearing. Steve ushered the kids out of the room and glanced back briefly with a stupid little wave. He caught the look in Billy's eyes before Billy saw him looking and gave him that ridiculous smirk. Steve rolled his eyes and left, but that expression stayed with him. Billy had looked...lost. Like he was dreading the silence that was going to follow their departure. And Steve was intimately familiar with _that_ feeling.

He dropped the kids off and was headed back to his big empty house, and he couldn't get that damn look out of his head. He tried to convince himself he hadn't really seen it, and then that it wasn't any of his business, and then that he didn't actually owe Billy fucking Hargrove anything, and then he was turning his car around and making a stop before he headed back to the hospital.

Visiting hours were over, obviously, but Steve had talked his way past the nurses before, when Max wanted to stay late sometimes. He didn't have much trouble with it this time either, and it wasn't long before he was slipping back into Billy's room, a paper bag in one hand and a milkshake in the other. He was half-expecting Billy to be asleep, but he turned his head when Steve opened the door. Billy's eyebrows shot up in surprise when no one followed Steve through the door. He turned down the TV and gave Steve a long look.

"What are you doing here, Harrington?" Steve shrugged and dropped the bag on the table next to Billy's bed, dropping into the chair and tilting it back onto two legs.

"Thought you might want something that wasn't hospital food." He nodded toward the bag, and then leaned forward and pulled out his own burger and fries. He shoved the bag toward Billy and took a long sip of his milkshake.

"You brought me food." It wasn't a question. Billy's voice was laced with skepticism, which was fair, actually. They weren't _friends_. Steve just shrugged again.

"If you don't want it, I'll just eat all of it. I'm starving." Billy stared at him for another long moment and then reached out and pulled the bag toward himself. He quirked an eyebrow at Steve's milkshake.

"I didn't see a second one of those anywhere?" Steve just grinned at him.

"Thanks, Steve, I really appreciate the burger and fries," he said in a ridiculous voice, and then he took a long, obnoxious sip of his milkshake. Billy choked on a french fry, recovered, and snorted a laugh.

"You're a dick," Billy said, and Steve stared at him, mock offended.

"I brought you food! How am I the dick in this scenario?" he demanded. Billy looked at him, expression a little bemused, but he didn't say anything.

Silence fell as they both ate, but it was companionable somehow. Billy turned the TV back up and they watched part of an action movie. Steve leaned his chair back again, propping his feet at the end of Billy's bed just to be irritating. Billy shot him a glare, but didn't kick his feet off the bed. Steve decided to interpret that as gratitude. He hung out for a couple of hours, until they were both yawning.

"Time for me to go," he finally announced, when he could barely keep his eyes open. He stood up and stretched, a little stiff from the chair. "I'll be back with Max and whoever else wants to come tomorrow." Billy didn't say anything, but Steve could feel his eyes on him as he turned and headed for the door.

"Hey Steve?" Billy asked, just before Steve opened the door to leave. Steve could count the number of times Billy Hargrove had called him by his first name on one hand. He turned back to see that Billy had that bemused expression on his face again. "Why did you actually come back here?" he asked. It was a little accusatory, but there was a thread of genuine curiosity in there too. Steve opened his mouth to reply, but Billy cut him off. "Tell the truth," he said quietly, tone stuck somewhere between a command and a request. It was a challenge, but there was an appeal in there too. Steve thought for a long moment and then he shrugged and told the truth. Most of it, anyway.

"It beats my empty house," he said softly to the floor, and then he looked up and smiled a little bit. "And I thought you might not hate the company." And if that wasn't the entire truth, well, how could he be expected to tell someone else the whole truth when he wasn't sure he understood it himself? Billy nodded slowly, but didn't say anything. Steve waited for a beat, and then he slipped out the door and went home.

Steve was back a few nights later, this time with two enormous Slurpees. His parents had called earlier in the day, which always put him in a bad mood, and he finally decided he couldn't stand the silence anymore. Billy glanced up when he slipped through the door, and Steve could have sworn he caught a ghost of an actual smile before Billy shot him a smirk.

"Did you get lonely again, pretty boy?" Steve scoffed.

"I am, in fact, doing you the _favor_ of keeping you company," he replied, dropping into the chair and setting the drinks on the table. "You can have cherry cola, or...cherry cola," he said, taking one and sipping. Billy watched him for a moment and then reached out and took the other Slurpee. "So what's on tonight?" Steve asked, leaning back in the chair and propping up his feet. Billy let his feet stay where they were and his glare was halfhearted this time. Steve gave himself a point. They watched another movie, horror this time, and talked about nothing much. And that turned into the pattern.

It was a few weeks later when it came up again. Steve had stayed late--it was after midnight--and he was reluctantly dragging himself to his feet. Billy was laughing at him.

"Seriously, Harrington, go home. You really can't find anything better to do than disturb my beauty rest?"

"Shut up, you love it," Steve muttered through a yawn. "Or at the very least, you don't hate it." _Right?_ Steve wondered. Billy snickered again and opened his mouth to say something, but this time Steve stopped him. "Tell the truth," he said, aiming for the tone Billy had used last time, and landing on something a little more intent than he would have liked. Billy stopped smiling and an expression Steve couldn't identify moved across his face. Steve wanted to take it back, tell him he had been joking, but Billy spoke before he could find the words. He looked away from Steve and then down at his hands.

"Sometimes I..." he cleared his throat. "Sometimes I think too much when I'm here by myself." His eyes went to Steve's for just a fraction of a second, and then moved away. Steve nodded and turned away, heading for the door. He paused right before he left, but he didn't turn around.

"I hate that," he said to the doorframe, and then he left.

After that, Steve started coming back more often. They watched movies and TV, and talked about nothing and occasionally something, and it didn't come up often, but it did keep coming up.

"Tell the truth," Billy said one night. "What are you afraid of?" Steve stared at the ceiling and thought about how much truth to tell.

"The dark," he said to the ceiling tiles. "Being alone." He didn't just mean in his empty house. He huffed a little laugh, but there was no humor in it. "Being a disappointment. Not having a future." There was a long pause. _That you'll hear the things I don't say_ , he thought. _That you'll never hear the things I don't say_.

"Yeah," Billy finally breathed. He didn't look at Steve. "Yeah."

"Tell the truth," Steve said weeks later. "What do you want, after this?" There was a very long pause.

"I want to get out of this town," Billy said slowly. He was staring at the ceiling this time. "College, maybe? Go somewhere warm. Try to forget," he said with a bitter laugh. The silence stretched out. It felt meaningful, like maybe there was something else coming, but nothing ever did.

"Yeah," said Steve. He tried, but he couldn't keep a thread of wistfulness out of his voice. He went home not long after that.

Once Billy got out of the hospital, Steve half-expected them to stop hanging out, but they didn't. Billy showed up at Steve's house at random intervals, and they drank beer sometimes and got high sometimes, although Billy's tolerance for both was absolutely nothing at first, to Steve's laughing delight. Steve told the truth to the surface of his backyard pool, and the vast darkness of the quarry, and the stars beyond the tops of the trees at the ends of long, dark roads. He knew better than to look at those pretty eyes when he was trying to be careful. Even so, he started to worry that Billy was eventually going to notice that his silences had a specific shape.

"Tell the truth," Billy reiterated one spring night, well past midnight. He had said it twice, so the question was going to be important. Steve nodded a little drunkenly, listening, his eyes on the trees above them and the sky beyond, but a question didn’t come. Just silence and Billy’s harsh breathing. Steve was about to glance over when Billy finally spoke, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. "Do you think I was already a monster? You know, before?" Steve turned his head to stare, but Billy was facing away from him, looking out at the woods instead.

"No," Steve said simply, but it didn't seem like enough. "I don't think you've ever been a monster," he added, and he had never meant anything more than he meant that. There was no response except for a hitch in Billy’s breathing. Steve watched, but Billy didn’t turn his head. It was possible that his shoulders were shaking, but Steve knew better than to _notice_.

If it was a game, Billy was much better at it than Steve was. He always managed to get a little bit more truth out of Steve than Steve wanted to give. He couldn't even be mad about it--on the rare occasions that Steve was really honest with himself, he admitted that he would be happy to lose every single time as long as they never stopped playing.

Pretty soon, though, it was summer again. Billy had a diploma and a scholarship to UCLA, and Steve was doing his very best to ignore the fact that summer was eventually going to end. If he just never thought about it, he reasoned, then he didn't have to look at how empty his future was about to be. As July turned into August, though, he got worse at not thinking about it. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his laugh turned brittle, and the Party all looked at him with concern in their eyes when they thought he couldn't see, but he didn't know how to keep it together when panic was bubbling up in his chest, just, all the time.

And now he's at the quarry with Billy, who is leaving for California in two weeks, and Steve hasn't slept for a while, and Billy's question rings in his ears. _What do you want, after this?_ There's an unexpected weight to it because Billy's still looking at him instead of at anything else, gaze intense, waiting. _I can't tell the truth to your face_ , Steve wants to say but doesn't. Instead, he sits up on the hood of the Camaro. He looks out at the quarry. He feels unprepared for whatever this is, but then again, he almost always feels that way. He glances back at Billy again, hoping he's looked away, but he hasn't.

Steve takes a deep breath. _Here we go_ , he thinks, the risk effervescent under his skin. He stares into those pretty ocean eyes (and realizes that they don't look sad at all, haven't for a while now), and he tells the truth. This time, he doesn't leave anything out.

**Author's Note:**

> But THEN what happens??????
> 
> Come say hello on tumblr if you want to--@paperbodiesamongthestars


End file.
